Literary Studies & Poetry

It has been surprisingly easy for Victorian scholars to overlook Thomas Carlyle in recent years as an unfashionable “Victorian sage.”  But in his time, in George Eliot’s description, Carlyle was like an oak leaving fertile acorns of ideas that would grow and spread with good influence.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle, author of "Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb," shares 10 intriguing facts about intrepid writer Sanora Babb — peerless author of midcentury American literature who was silenced by John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

Somewhere between the virtuosic parodies of Frank Zappa and the screwball wit of Monty Python, the Firesign Theatre reinvented the comedy album in the 1960s and ’70s. Jeremy Braddock explores their legacy.